Dear Terry,
The snippet quotes in Carlos’s post reminds me that your posts primarily refer to organisations. Design-oriented businesses are formal organisations. If not, what are you writing about?
These were indeed your assumptions and not mine. But as Carlos notes, the writing is so byzantine in these posts on Beer’s Viable Systems Model that one can easily become confused, even when you have yourself written them.
The problem is an overload of jargon. Since relatively few subscribers to PhD-Design will have read The Brain of the Firm, a sentence such as “Developing new strategies to provide information from the different technical and non-technical streams of design practices to provide information to the business managers of design organisations would assist with developing and strengthening systems element 3*.” is simply confusing.
So are sentences such as “Working to gather information from outside of design realms and analyse its potential for improving how design activity might be undertaken or improving design outcomes would provide new information to guide strategy-making and business development. That is, it would strengthen system element 4 in Beer's VSM.”
If you would start with clear definitions of what these mean — or what you mean by them — this would help.
But even without answering questions about formal organisations, I’d welcome your answer to these five questions:
1) How can we use Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model to solve the problems of the design field?
2) Please define Beer’s Viable Systems Model as you see it. Using undefined terms from the model transforms Beer’s ideas into jargon. Please define Beer’s VSM in a way that explains how to apply it to the design field as a field.
3) What do you mean by the proper noun [D]esign as distinct from the design field?
4) No answer needed.
5) No answer needed.
6) What do you (Terry Love) see as the “specific cultural and organisational failings or organisational illnesses” of the design field?
7) How can we use Beer’s VSM to change this situation?
After several long, roundabout sets of comments, could you please give us a quick, concise paragraph on each of my five questions? If you need more than one paragraph, I’d take the time to read your answers. I know what I think, and I think I know what Stafford Beer thinks — but I can’t figure out what you mean to say in your notes on Beer's Viable Systems Model.
Yours,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
Email [log in to unmask] | Academia http://swinburne.academia.edu/KenFriedman | D&I http://tjdi.tongji.edu.cn
—
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|